SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 28 February 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
Site updated on 23 February 2026
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Area 51
Area 51 is a United States Air Force base in southern Nevada, the existence of which was not formally acknowledged by the US Government until 1995. This secrecy and the classified nature of the base's work have made it a magnet for Paranoia-fraught conspiracy theories, the most popular of which relate to UFOs and Aliens (often linked to the supposed crashed Spaceship recovered near ...
Posteritas
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The Siege of London (1885 chap), a Battle of Dorking tale in which an incoherent Liberal government in Britain destabilizes the country and gives France the opportunity to mount a successful Invasion, climaxes in the surrender of London and the disintegration of the British Empire. [JC]
Fuller, Claire
(1967- ) UK sculptor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "All Clear in the Anderton House" in After the Fall: Tales of the Apocalypse (anth 2014) edited anonymously. Her first four novels share a sense of dread that the ground may not hold, either in their protagonists' fragile lives, or in planetary terms, somewhere down the line. This aura may be most explicit in the first of these, Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), ...
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovyer de
(1657-1757) French man of letters whose work pointed forward to the Age of Reason; nephew of the dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606-1684). He wrote much, and one of his most important books became a seminal influence on Proto SF: Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités (1686; exp 1687; trans Sir W D Knight as A Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds 1687; new trans Aphra Behn as ...
Tully, John
(1923-2019) UK author of NatFact 7 (1984), a Young Adult tale set in a Near Future Dystopian UK; the eponymous living/manufacturing complex, half Keep half Prison, serves as background for a partially successful revolt led by the young. The eight-volume Starpol set of separately published short stories for younger readers in ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...